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Careful with that iPhone, or you might end up in Kazakhstan (Updated)

With the iPhone 2. Chicago!

As the B-list of reviewers churn out mounds of information about their iPhone 3Gs this weekend, a number of us have discovered a glaring bug in the iPhone's geotagging data. It appears as if Apple's software accidentally pegs some of us (or everyone?) in the wrong hemisphere, and when you apply those coordinates to a map, they end up on the other side of the world. For example, my photos taken in Chicago are showing up in China, near Kazakhstan:

This bug is also being seen by Ars Technica's Clint Ecker (also in China, which looks shockingly like Wicker Park in Chicago), Macworld's Dan Moren (he's in Kyrgyzstan, also known as Boston), and Macworld's Jason Snell (sitting in a boat in China's Yellow Sea, which is nicknamed "San Francisco"). In fact, there's already a thread about the issue on Apple's support discussion boards as it applies to those in the southern hemisphere, like Australia, because Apple stores the data as Latitude North and Longitude West instead of Latitude South and Longitude East. Whoops.

Clint's digging further into the issue as we speak, but for the time being, do some sight-seeing while you're on the other side of the world, would ya?

Update: Further tests show that on occasion, the iPhone tags photos with the right data, and other times, it tags it wrong. We are unable (as of yet) to find any sort of consistent pattern that can correlate when it's right with certain conditions and when it's wrong with other conditions. The problem is reproducible across multiple iPhones on multiple computers, but those same iPhones and same computers will occasionally spit out correct data too. Weird.

Update x2: We have nailed down the problem to an iPhoto -> Finder bug. As it turns out, it's not a problem with the iPhone specifically, but some data that gets lost when you drag photos from iPhoto into the Finder. Apple is already aware of the issue, so hopefully it will be resolved soon!

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui